I ran to the shelf above my bed and began searching for my copy of the novel … All my books were there except … God! Luqman actually had been here! I had not been hallucinating or imagining things. He really did come into my room, mess around with my things, and take his book from my shelf. Then he left, and now he has come back. He enters and exists without anyone spotting him, and he is down there this instant, waving at me. Isn’t he doing it to make me understand that he has come to realize that he is the same Luqman as the one in my novel, and that therefore I must acknowledge it too?

I returned to the window, my legs shaking and scarcely able to hold my weight. I stood off to one side, thinking maybe I could see him without him seeing me. When I leaned over to steal a glance, the electricity suddenly cut out, and I could see nothing but darkness. I glanced at my watch. It showed 10:25. That meant the power had gone out a full twenty-five minutes behind the daily schedule.

———

These two cadavers of flesh and bone and blue veins, lying here in my lap—are they my hands? And these creased, knotted chopsticks connected to my palms, are they really my fingers? Is this cold slab that rises and falls under my chin at a steady rate, is it my chest, behind which hides my heart? How is it that I am sitting inside my body without feeling it, and I cannot see any of the organs or distinguish the different parts?

I remain a hermit locked in my room. I see its objects gather around me, keeping my silence company for hours without getting bored or complaining. It’s in my power to remain like this forever, not moving, not thinking, not feeling. Or else I could leave and go elsewhere, without any particular reason behind the change. I do it all with a remarkable ease and flexibility. It’s only my bouts of trembling, which have intensified recently and shift between my different limbs, that make me lose control of myself. That, and also the absence of my body, which I do not see, and which no longer comes along when I move or try to do something. It just stands there, stubborn and headstrong as a mule.

After he went through the window, my father exited his body because it was no longer residing in this world. When the body is no longer a resident, the world erases itself. My father erased the world. Then he left his body, and his soul remained suspended, without anyone to pull it down. Who is it that plucks the souls of the fathers from the tree of life if not their sons? Neither Sa’id nor I did it, so my father’s poor soul remains hanging in the air.